Charles Shadle was just 10 years old when he was entrusted with a precious family heirloom: a book of music that his great-great-great-grandmother had brought with her on the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Native Americans to Oklahoma from their southeastern homelands beginning in the 1830s. Today, this extraordinary gift remains a symbol of two significant threads interwoven in Shadle’s life: music and his Choctaw heritage. “There was usually a person in every generation that music was important to, and I was the one in my generation,” says…
